High Stakes and Big Ideas: Teach-in draws hundreds to Ottawa to challenge the Security and Prosperity Partnership
The energy was palpable in
Ottawa from March 30 to
April 1, 2007. Over 1,500
people crammed themselves
into a concert hall and a high
school to learn about the
Security and Prosperity Partnership
of North America and how to fight it.
Activists, academics, workers, policy
experts, journalists, artists, musicians
– and even breakdancers – congregated
for Integrate This! Challenging the
Security and Prosperity Partnership of
North America, a free teach-in sponsored
by the Council of Canadians, the
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
and the Canadian Labour Congress.
Avi Lewis, acclaimed broadcaster and
the moderator for the Integrate This!
panel discussions, captured participants’
enthusiasm when he said:
“There is a geeky thrill to a teach-in.
There’s the fact that you’ve come here
on a Saturday morning. That you’re
smelling the high school hallway smell,
and that you are excited by that. I find
that intoxicating. Teach-ins are pivotal
moments and people remember them
… you’re going to be able to say I was
there in that high school auditorium in
Ottawa. And you are going to leave here
full of facts …”
When we saw hundreds of people
stream into the auditorium of the
Ottawa Technical High School at 8:30
on a Saturday morning, we knew that
we were in the midst of an exciting
political moment.
Council of Canadians staff members
were still riding a wave of excitement
from the night before, when a roster of
over 25 musicians, artists and dancers
gathered at Capital Music Hall for our
Power In Numbers party, the official
launch for the Integrate This! teach-in.
Local stars Andrew Vincent and the
Pirates, and the Soul Jazz Orchestra,
shared the stage with Nomadic Massive,
a collective of hip-hop artists from
Montreal who electrified the crowd in
English, French and Creole. We also
heard from DJ Rise Ashen and slam
poets Doretta Charles, John Akpata
and Ritallin, watching in awe as local
breakdancers flipped and spun through
the air. Host Alanna Stuart kept driving
the message home that this party was a
protest against the SPP.
But the next morning, people still had
lots of energy for a long day of discussion
and action planning. It was incredible
to see the connections being made
that day between students and veteran
Council chapter members, between
environmentalists and anti-poverty
activists, between workers and volunteers
from dozens of social justice and
non-profit organizations. We met activists
from Canada, the U.S. and Mexico,
all dedicated to raising awareness of
the danger that the SPP poses to their
countries’ independence, social security
and environment.
This is the kind of energy that propelled
people to take to the streets and disrupt
the World Trade Organization meeting
in Seattle in 1999. It’s the kind of passion
that saw thousands of people braving
tear gas to protest against the Free
Trade Area of the Americas in Quebec
City in 2001. It’s the kind of dedication
that encourages hundreds of people to
spend a sunny Saturday in a high school
auditorium.
The Integrate This! teach-in featured
five panel discussions, twenty workshops
and more than a dozen strategy sessions,
all aimed at spreading information
about the Security and Prosperity
Partnership and brainstorming creative
ways to challenge the SPP in our communities.
“The stakes are very high here,” said
Maude Barlow that day. “And we have
the opportunity not only to defeat
something that is profoundly wrong for
our peoples and for the sustainability of
our planet, but to promote something
very, very different.”
Business of insecurity
With corporate Canada
intent on trading
Canadian sovereignty for
greater access to American
markets, the SPP is ushering
in a new definition
of “security,” which places Canadians
at risk of unfair accusations and invasions
of privacy. Does more surveillance
make us feel secure? Is it more important
for Canada to protect its trading
relationship with the United States
than the civil liberties of its citizens? At
the Integrate This! teach-in, we sought
answers to these questions, and more.
John Foster from the North-South
Institute expressed concern about the
secrecy of the SPP implementation process,
focusing specifically on the North
American Competitiveness Council.
Foster wondered aloud how “unhealthy
and weak our democracies are if we are
permitting and tolerating unique and
privileged access for a group of powerful
and overpaid corporate CEOs … to
advance agendas that will change the
face of the continent and how it has
governed.”
Foster referred to a meeting of the
North American Forum that was held in
Banff, Alberta, September 12-14, 2006.
Minister of Public Safety Stockwell Day
was there, and so was Defence Minister
Gordon O’Connor. They met with
U.S. and Mexican government officials
and business leaders to discuss North
American integration. The event was
chaired by former U.S. secretary of state
George Schultz, former Alberta premier
Peter Lougheed, and former Mexican
finance minister Pedro Aspe.
Despite the involvement of senior North
American politicians, organizers did not
alert the media about the event. The
event was organized by the Canadian
Council of Chief Executives and the
Canada West Foundation, an Alberta
think-tank that promotes, among other
things, closer economic integration with
the United States.
At the Integrate This! teach-in,
Foster revealed that a recent Access to
Information request uncovered that the
Canadian government’s communications
strategy for this meeting was to
insist that the meeting was “private,”
and that “participants were instructed
to avoid direct media engagement.”
“This is communication by stealth,”
said Foster, “and its watchwords are oil
and war, dressed up as energy strategy
and security.”
Maureen Webb, human rights lawyer
and author of the recently published
Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance
and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World,
focused on how the business community
and the Canadian government are
“working hand in glove” to implement
security measures “lockstep with the
U.S. government.”
According to Webb, the U.S. government
is using the principle of pre-emption
to guide its security policies, and
this is having a dramatic impact on
Canada’s security practices.
“[Pre-emption] is dangerous in areas of
security,” she said. “The idea is that risk
needs to be eliminated to the greatest
degree possible. And that means everyone
needs to be evaluated as a potential
suspect.”
According to Webb, “our principles are
at stake here – things like due process,
presumption of innocence, the right to
know the evidence against you and to
respond, the right against unreasonable
search and seizure, rights under data
protection laws, rights of mobility and
asylum rights – all of these rights go out
the window in a pre-emptive model.”
Big oil and the environment
Canadians care about the environment.
At least, that’s what
the media has been reporting
since January, when Decima
released a poll indicating
that Canadians rank the
environment as their top priority, with
health care coming a close second. At
the Integrate This! teach-in, we wanted
to raise awareness of how continental integration is affecting the environment,
specifically highlighting threats to climate
change, public health and fresh
water.
Diana Gibson from the Parkland
Institute focused on the war industry
and its ever-escalating need for fuel.
“Why does the U.S. want our energy?”
she asked. “First, as everyone knows,
they consJuly 19, 2007e an energy strategy that
does not focus on reducing consumption,
but focuses on increasing and
securing supply for the future. And
Alberta’s tar sands feature quite prominently.
The U.S. had also made energy
part of their security agreement. Their
national security and their energy security
are one and the same.”
According to Gibson, since the implementation
of the proportional sharing
clause in NAFTA – which ensures that
Canada can never reduce the proportion
of energy that we export to the U.S.
– Canada has become a “resource hinterland
for the U.S.”
What’s worse, according to Gibson,
is that production has increased dramatically
in recent years and is set to go
even higher, since the Bush administration
has expressed a desire for a “fivefold
expansion” in the tar sands – a predicted
increase from 1 million barrels of oil
per day to over 5 million. And Canada
has the lowest taxes in the world on oil,
at only 23 cents per barrel.
Still, Gibson believes that there is sufficient
cause for optimism, given that
most of Canada’s energy is secure and
publicly owned.
“I think we need to look to Northern
European countries like Norway …
which has solid majority public ownership
of their energy. They save all of
their energy revenues to invest in their
future. They have strong policies around
foreign access. And they get 96 per cent
royalties off of their energy and the
industry is still lined up at the door to
get in there. There hasn’t been some
sort of capital strike against Norway …
Canada is completely out of step with
the rest of the world in energy sovereignty.”
Rosa Kouri and Ben Powless from the
Canadian Youth Climate Coalition
stressed the need for Canada to take
serious action on climate change, and
expressed concern over the disastrous
environmental implications associated
with increased production in the tar
sands.
For Kouri, the harmonization of environmental
regulations and health
safety standards under the Security and
Prosperity Partnership raises an alarm.
“While hemispheric standardization
would be a good idea if we were all to
raise ourselves up to a common standard,
generally what happens is that we
end up gravitating to somewhere below
average, and I would even say to the
bottom.”
Both Powless and Kouri discussed the
concept of a “just transition” to a more
environmentally sustainable future,
ensuring that the needs of vulnerable
communities and of low-income people
are taken into consideration.
“We want to make local communities
the owners of this transition,” said
Kouri. “Under NAFTA and the SPP,
Canada can’t give incentives to local
organizations to build a wind farm. This
reminds us that if the same big companies
are profiting from the transition to
a clean air economy, we only continue
to perpetuate economic and social
injustice.”
Democratic deficit
While the Council of
Canadians is a nonpartisan
organization,
we spend a lot of time
talking to politicians.
Sometimes we communicate
by delivering thousands of
petitions to their offices, as we did with
Environment Minister John Baird on
March 22, 2007. We often get our message
to them by flooding their offices
with emails and faxes. When required,
we make presentations to parliamentary
committees and lobby government leaders. But we rarely get the chance to hear
politicians respond to our concerns in
an open forum. That’s why we invited
representatives from the five major political
parties to the Integrate This! teachin.
We wanted to hear what they had to
say about the Security and Prosperity
Partnership, and Canada-U.S. relations
in general.
Regrettably, only the New Democartic
Party and the Green Party agreed to
attend.
Peter Julian, the NDP Member
of Parliament for Burnaby-New
Westminster and critic for international
trade, and Elizabeth May, leader of
the Green Party of Canada, addressed
our questions alongside José Antonio
Almazán, a deputy with the Partido de
la Revolución Democrática (PRD) in
Mexico.
Julian began the discussion by announcing
that NAFTA has failed. He said that
the notion that NAFTA has brought
more prosperity, employment and
exports to Canada is actually a myth.
“Since the signing in 1989 of the
Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement that
later morphed into NAFTA …what we
have seen is not unprecedented prosperity
for all Canadians, but unprecedented
prosperity for corporate lawyers and
CEOs.”
He pointed out that since 1989, the
poorest of Canadian families have lost
over one month of income per year,
their income having declined by an
average of 9 per cent. According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives,
working-class and middle-income
Canadians lost the equivalent of about
two weeks of income in the same
period. Meanwhile, the wealthiest of
Canadians have seen their real income
skyrocket by nearly 20 per cent, representing
a “complete re-jigging of our
economic system.”
Julian suggested that the reason the
Canadian government has kept the
Security and Prosperity Partnership
negotiations under wraps is that “they
know when it is a head-to-head debate
with the Canadian public (we saw that
with the Canada-U.S. free trade debate,
we’ve seen this with NAFTA) increasingly
they lose the public debate.”
Elizabeth May referred to the SPP as an
“attack on our core identity and on our
sovereignty by stealth.”
For May, the SPP represents a “fork in
the road for Canadian society – whether
we are going to pursue traditional
Canadian values internationally, or
whether we are going to become part
of Fortress North America, a large
gated community where U.S. security
forces will guard the perimeter and all
Canadians will be allowed to move
about freely, provided we’re willing to
have our irises scanned …”
José Antonio Almazán spoke about how
his party, the PRD, views the impact of
the Security and Prosperity Partnership
in Mexico:
“The SPP is not an alliance, it’s a
relationship of subordination. In the
context of the constitutional and legal
framework of Mexico, we consider it to
be a semi-colonial arrangement, insofar
as it implies even more of a loss of our
sovereignty as a nation.”
Still, Almazán said that opposition to
the SPP has been growing within parliamentary
and congressional spheres
within Mexico, and it has also taken
hold among civil society activists. He
expressed gratitude for the “conscious
and dignified grassroots participation”
at the Integrate This! teach-in, which
he said “is really where we build strong
movements to defend what is ours
– this planet, our lands, our water, our
forests, our natural resources, life.”
What we really want
After spending an entire day
discussing the kind of North
America that we don’t want
to see, we figured it was time
to present some positive,
progressive alternatives to
the Security and Prosperity Partnership.
We convened a discussion moderated
by veteran activist and broadcaster Judy
Rebick, who said:
“Without a vision of what we want
– the kind of world we’re fighting for,
we’re not going to be able to mobilize
to defeat what they’re bringing down
on us. Being against is not enough – we
have to know what we’re for.”
Bertha Lujan, Minister of Labour for
the Legitimate Government of Mexico,
addressed some common myths about
the impact of free trade in her country.
While NAFTA’s fans are quick to suggest
that the agreement has brought
prosperity to Mexicans, Lujan maintains
that it’s only the “multi-millionaire business
leaders of large corporations” that
have profited. Meanwhile, “real salaries
for people in all three countries continue
to slide, and so does employment.”
Lujan’s vision for a more just relationship
between Canada, the U.S. and
Mexico includes a focus on workers’
rights and the recognition of autonomous
legal systems for First Nations
peoples. It promotes sustainable economic
growth “that is respectful and
mindful of future generations,” relying
on fair trade rather than unfettered free
trade.
According to Antonia Juhasz, author of
The Bu$h Agenda: Invading the World
One Economy at a Time, we shouldn’t be
spending too much of our energy trying
to construct an alternative vision for
North America. Because she’s convinced
that “we actually know very, very clearly
what we want. We want worker rights
and protections, we want human rights
and protections, we want indigenous
rights and consumer rights, we want
economic justice, environmental justice,
economic equality, we want sovereignty, and we want democracy. We want unity.
We know all of these things, and we
have articulated them very well.”
While the United States government
may be spending billions of dollars on
the war in Iraq, Juhasz is optimistic
about the ability of social justice activists
to challenge the SPP.
“We have been very successful in challenging
their other modes of pushing
their agenda,” she said. “They established
the North American Free Trade
Agreement, and sought to expand it
through the Free Trade Area of the
Americas. What happened to that agenda?
They failed! Is there a Free Trade
Area of the Americas? Is it being negotiated
any more? No, absolutely not. It’s
a failure. And it’s a failure because of
our organizing and resistance … The
IMF and the World Bank have never
been weaker than they are right now.
Countries are refusing to contribute
money. Countries are refusing to pay
back loans.”
Maude Barlow ended the day by underscoring
the Council of Canadians’
demand that the Security and Prosperity
Partnership be brought to the public for
a full debate.
“These people do not have the mandate
to be moving ahead with an agenda by
stealth, to fundamentally and radically
change the face of North America in the
image of the big business community,
to confiscate the working people, the
resources, the social security, the civil
rights, the human rights of people in
the Americas for their agenda,” she said.
“They have not taken it to Parliament,
and we would not give it to them if
they did.”
For Barlow, the corporate sector’s vision
of North America stands in marked
contrast to the alternatives being
brought forward by civil society.
“We live our alternatives,” she said.
“We know what the alternative is to
their kind of greed, and we know that
in their system, the economy confiscates
people and communities to work
on behalf of the global economy. We
think it should be just the opposite. The
economy should serve communities and
people, and we will not rest until we
have this vision in our day-to-day lives
in all of our countries.”
Barlow encouraged the participants
at the Integrate This! teach-in to
work with partners in all three North
American countries to defeat the SPP:
“The environment crosses all of our
borders. Rivers, animals, air, cultural
diversity, ideas, and our people, travel.
And we want to share something very,
very fundamentally different. And we
want our voices part of this process,”
she said.
To read the full report of the
Integrate This! teach-in, visit
www.IntegrateThis.ca, and don’t
forget to sign up for email updates,
so we can keep you informed as plans
progress to protest against the SPP
Leaders’ Summit in Montebello,
Quebec, August 20-21.
– by Ariel Troster
Photos: 1. Avi Lewis; 2. workshop participants; 3. audience member; 4. audience member; 5. audience member; 6. Hip-hop group Nomadic Massive kicked off the teach-in on March 29; 7. Bertha Lujan brought a message of solidarity from Mexicans fighting the SPP; 8. Maude Barlow and Antonia Juhasx. Credit: Christina Riley
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